Thief of Words (15 page)
Kathleen looked down quickly but stopped writing, her pencil remaining frozen above the papers.
“DePaul? Poetry? Jesus, what’s the newsroom coming to?” Descanso said.
“Don’t be an animal, Thurm,” said Laura. “Unlike the Business department, we have sensitive souls in Features.”
Descanso, a tidy man who wore tailored suits and got a haircut every two weeks, grinned broadly; he liked being called an animal. “Does this literary agent have a name? Maybe she’d like to meet a real man.”
“Annie Hollerman,” said Laura. “But you’re too late, Thurm, she’s taken.”
More editors came into the room, beginning the usual hubbub. Laura noticed that Kathleen’s pencil still hadn’t moved.
Thirty minutes later, the meeting ended with tomorrow’s page one stories mapped out.
Laura headed back to the Features department, followed by Kathleen, who passed her on the way to Jack’s desk.
“We missed you at the four o’clock,” Kathleen said to Jack, who was pretending to be on the phone. “It’s just not the same without you.”
Jack had also pretended not to notice her approach. But an image, like a flashback from a fevered opium dream, had arrived in advance of her: naked Kathleen, back arched, legs spread, sweat. Jack looked up at the demure version in front of him and wondered if there was such a thing as the devil.
“I’m sure the four o’clock will survive without me,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much. Just wanted to check with you about the conference. Proctor and I are both taking the nine-seventeen Metroliner to New York. If you do, too, then we can all get a cab together to the hotel.”
“I don’t know yet when I’m going.”
“You should book now,” said Kathleen. “The train was filling up when I called last week.”
“Yeah. I’ve been procrastinating. I did book a room, however.” A miniature smile shaped Kathleen’s mouth. “I know,” she said. “I’m three doors down.”
“What a coincidence.” Jack said it as sarcastically as he could, but felt a tiny jolt of excitement surge across his chest anyway.
“Yes, isn’t it?” she said and walked away.
Jack stared daggers at her. Bitch, he thought, you think you can play me like a trout. Well, we’ll see who’s hooked and who’s not. But the aftershocks of that jolt vibrated on, and, to his shame, he could feel a little glow of triumph deep inside: she had come crawling back.
Jack rubbed his face in his hands. Okay, he thought, the devil may exist, but now I have the exorcist—Annie Hollerman.
T
hat night the exorcism rites were held at the base of Jack’s old Mac. He considered her previous e-mail, the one inviting him to dinner. At her place.
At her place.
That could only mean one thing.
She’s just upped the ante—again, Jack thought. Now it’s my turn. Okay, Annie Hollerman, fasten your seat belt.
Subject: The Tiger
Dear Annie,
Saturday sounds great. But how about here, in Baltimore? I promised to loan my car to Matthew for the weekend, so I can’t drive down to D.C. Shall I make dinner reservations? I know just the place. The food isn’t great (this is Baltimore after all), but the view is. Say 7:30. Come to my apartment, and we’ll drive to Remmy’s.
Before I see you in person, I have another story to tell you. It begins in Nepal.
Annie is there. Jack has taken her. It comes to her like a dream—her memories of that thin jungle, where the newborn Ganges braids and unbraids the Himalayas. They are there to see a tiger. They are there to find each other.
Annie didn’t know the place existed, this place of rattan and teak, with a porch exactly as high as the back of an elephant. She didn’t know that lantern light turns the walls to honey; that iridescent moths call out the night and drum against the window screens to awaken the stars.
She didn’t know, until Jack brought her there. Brought her to a room full of shadows, a room with a bed, a chair, a rattan chest, a bed stand, a ceramic basin, and a pitcher of water.
Over the bed a ceiling fan slowly moves the heat around. Across the bed lies a cover full of colors. It was stitched together by old women who have forgotten love and only remember how things end. Its pattern is as old as the river.
Annie sits on the bed barefoot, arms around her knees, and watches Jack turn the lantern down to an ember and take off his traveler’s things. She watches the shadows slip around his body, naked as the moon, touching him everywhere. She rises and pours water into the basin. She dampens a hand towel and wipes the long dusty day from Jack’s skin.
And then she is a shadow, too, touching him, kissing him, her tongue fluttering, flying all over him. Then her sighs mix with the sounds of the forest. The hoo, hoo, hoo of monkeys. The barking of miniature deer. The brrrrrr of insects.
Slowly, the shadows shadow each other. Slowly, until there is a sound, a deep cough, outside somewhere in the forest. Then the shadows stop and the cicadas stop and the infinite forest rustlings are swallowed up. And in the silence, Annie’s sighs echo back to her. Jack picks her up and carries her from the bed, out to the railing at the far edge of the lantern glow. He holds her with his body. She is filled with him and filled with the night. They look down into the darkness.
There is another cough. It’s off to the left, not far. It is a tiger, at the edge of the forest, come to see them. For a moment the forest holds its breath. Every foot is frozen above dry leaves. Annie has never heard a stillness so loud. Then a star skitters down the Milky Way. The forest sighs and begins to speak again. Frogs start a rhythmic churrrt, churrrt. Crickets pick up the gossip.
The tiger has gone, but he will never leave them. For now, Jack and Annie cannot help but know that there’s something there. And it’s powerful and it’s beautiful and it’s real.
Jack
A
nnie scrolled back to the top of Jack’s e-mail. She began to reread it, then stopped and looked over at the other bed. Her mother lay on her back, making soft snoring noises, like a miniature choo-choo train. Satisfied that her mother was asleep, Annie returned to the laptop screen and scrunched down deep into the pillows and even deeper into the forests of Nepal.
When she came back, she lay against the pillows in the darkened hotel room, her face fluoresced by the glowing green portal to another world and time. After a few minutes she straightened up, smiled at the screen propped against her legs, and started tapping the keyboard, thankful that her mother had always been a heavy sleeper.
Subject: Cat’s-eye Green
Dear Jack,
Dinner in Baltimore sounds great. I can’t wait. We can talk about tigers and jungle and other steamy things that now are embedded in my memory.
I’m becoming like Lynn McCain—you know, my reluctant mystery writer. She also confuses what’s real with what’s written. Her books are very autobiographical; the characters are based on her family members and the sleuth is basically her. Though she makes up some of the stories, many come from her life. She once told me she can’t remember anymore which ones are real and which ones are fiction. I used to think she was exaggerating, just getting carried away with her Appalachian storytelling schtick.
But after traveling the world in your e-mails, I know what she’s talking about. Words can etch into your mind and change your memories.
Who’d have thought memory to be so malleable? You grow up believing what you remember is true, that memory is like steel: stiff, unbending, impervious. But age changes certainty, doesn’t it? Instead of steel, memory seems more like lead, soft and yielding, or maybe even mercury, the liquid metal in constant change. Liquid memory, doesn’t that sound like something Jim Morrison would have sung about?
A while back I read an article in Scientific American about memory experiments on mice. The researchers concluded that memory wasn’t reliable, not in mice and even less so in humans. Apparently we mix and match bits and pieces of our lives to form what we think are real memories, like some kind of crazy quilt of experience. Not only that, but our mood determines what memories we choose to store. Isn’t that amazing? So if you’re depressed, you’re more likely to ferret away unhappy events.
And if you’re happy—as I am now reading your wonderful e-mails—you’ll make the happy times your memory.
Jack, you’ve given me happy times. And happy new memories. Now it’s my turn to give you one, though I’m sure you remember it already. It was after we left Nepal, we traveled slowly south and west to Tangier …
You’re standing in the ancient market. You close your eyes; breathe deeply; smell the dust on the narrow streets. A thin, sharp line of color races to your brain. Just beyond that, something fuller, slower, more abundant. You let yourself sink into the smell. You see it. Green. You smell green, cat’s-eye green, lover’s-eye green, the green of the hidden pond you found one afternoon, the pond you made love by, the green of her eyes.
You inhale deeper and see the rest of it. Green and billowy. You look closer. You see more colors. Little edges of copper, saffron, and crimson move in and off. You stand there breathing deeply. Trying to remember that memory. What is it? If you believed in past lives, you’d say it was an ancient memory, a smell from another time, another culture.
“It’s some kind of spice,” the woman next to you says. You look at her. Today her eyes are green. The green of your hidden pond, where you made love to the first woman who left your life when all you wanted was for her to stay.
You look at the woman standing next to you. The sun is against her back, its golden light washing over her. She leans over and skims the back of her fingers across your face into your hair. She looks into your eyes. What does she see? Lost loves? Her hidden ponds or yours?
She sees a man so like herself she wonders if this isn’t some cosmic joke. If once again, the mischievous gods who play her pieces aren’t bored, want to shake things up a bit, want to see what she’ll do. Will she be stupid again?
“Breathe,” she says to you, as her lips press against your eyelids. “Smell it? You know what it is?”
She moves her lips down your face to your mouth, where she whispers a kiss, so lightly you wonder if you haven’t made this all up. If you open your eyes, she, the smell, the memory of the hidden pond, your broken heart, will all be gone.
She presses against you. You feel her chest expand, her ribs opening, to take in the air.
“lt’s the smell of hope.”
Annie
C
orset? Garter belt? Negligee?
Thong? No, not anymore, Annie thought. Well, really, not ever.
She walked through the Victoria’s Secret on Connecticut Avenue. Now she had a reason to replace her tattered underwear: her date with Jack that night.
She wound slowly around the display tables, running her fingers across the silky fabrics, running her mind across Jack’s last e-mail and their first kiss in the Bethesda parking lot.
She’d been surprised at how deep his chest had felt when she’d wrapped her arms around him, how solid he’d felt against her, a little bear of a man. He’d pulled her hard against him. Once again, she could feel his warmth; his fingers entwined deep in her hair, as if he were hanging on to a runaway horse. She remembered the first touch of her lips on his, the jolt, the rush, the hot glittery feeling that started in her abdomen and glissaded down like glowing fireworks.
Annie grabbed a table of push-up bras for support. A sales-woman came swooping down and she pretended to examine a puffy gray one.
“We’re having a special sale—buy one of our Angel bras and get a coordinating panty for half price,” said the saleswoman, a thirtyish blonde with too much lip liner. “I’ll bring you the matching panty. Iced pewter?”
Annie dropped the washed-out bra in her hand. She’d never owned anything that drab in her life. “No thanks, I’m just looking.” Annie tried to put enough edge in her voice so the sales-woman would retreat for good.
She walked to a rack of silky nightgowns in deep jewel tones. She held the sapphire one to her body and looked in the mirror. Good color, delicate cut, sexy straps. Definitely eye-popping material. Get real, Annie thought, like you’re going to have time tonight to stop in the middle of things to slip into something sexy. Go for taking something off.
A fancy bra? No, too architectural with all those underwires and hooks and strategic pads. A camisole? They’re soft and inviting, they skim your breasts with lace or satin and innocently drape down to your waist. She imagined Jack’s fingers tracing her outlines across the smooth fabric. A camisole, definitely.
Annie piled an assortment over her arm. On her way to the fitting room, she spotted a rack of matching tap pants. Bingo. Tap pants. Perfect. Men love them because they’re slinky and loose; women love them even more because they hide flaws.
The lip-liner lady led Annie to one of the cubicles. Everything inside was pink, except the little white hearts on the pink wallpaper. “Let me know if you need a different size or anything,” she said.
Annie stripped to her bikinis and stood before the mirror. What had happened to all those miles on the treadmill and the cross-trainer, all those lunges and squats, all those leg lifts? Then again, there were all those sticky buns and ice-cream cones. What’d she expect, Cameron Diaz? Things could be worse; her arms were good (all those push-ups), her waist hourglassed (thanks for the genes, Mom), and her calves were shapely.
She slipped a lilac camisole over her head and felt it glide over her breasts. She rewound Jack’s tiger e-mail and began to play it slowly out. He stood on the balcony before her; jungle noises all around. He reached out; she felt his fingers brush the base of her throat and slowly travel the path of her breastbone. They left off somewhere far below, but almost immediately she felt them again, two hands this time, tracing her clavicles.
